Written by Kent Learned, 12 October 2018, originally posted to the Wonderland History Facebook group.
One of the early ride P.A. headaches was the Snowy River Ride intercom system. The first couple of years, I just had to nurse it along. Whoever created it left no documentation, and it seemed to be based off a number of cheap home intercom kits from Jaycar or Dick Smiths. They more or less worked, but there was always a lot of buzzing in them, and the headphones kept breaking. The buzzing was from the three or four huge pumps that were required to keep the water moving around the ride.
We finally did a few tests with a pair of entertainment-industry style intercoms with some good headphones, and the buzzing was greatly reduced, but not gone. After analyzing the circuitry of several different entertainment industry systems, I took the best bits from them, and then created some special circuits to cancel out the buzzing. I also added a call buzzer that the operators could not ignore.
Everything was mounted in a waterproof box, and I hardly ever had to visit them again, except to change headphones. The headphones themselves were made by a German company for the television and movie industry, cost $300 each, were nearly bulletproof, and I was able to buy spare parts to repair them. There was some resistance from management about getting them, but we won the day in the end, and had about 8 sets of them.
Some of the operators were wanting me to put a radio or music into the system, so they had something to listen to while sitting there. I felt quite strongly that the system was a “Safety System” and ignored the requests. In light of the tragedy at Dream World, I think I made the right decision.